The anti-social network: When Twitter goes wrong, it goes very, very wrong

Twitter has helped topple dictators, turned nobodies into somebodies and made a few people very, very rich. But tap out the wrong 140 characters and you can quickly find yourself in hashtag hell, or even facing legal action, says Steven Poole

Twitter can make you a star, but it can also ruin your life. Like the Force in the Star Wars universe, it has both a light side and a dark side. And when Twitter goes bad, it can go very bad indeed. That cute blue bird can morph into a slobbering vulture. The embattled Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, recently growled: ‘There is a trouble called Twitter… Social media, in my opinion, is the worst menace to society.’ He was discombobulated by protests against his government, but might he accidentally have had a wider point?

There’s no doubt that Twitter has been very good to some people. In 2009, an unemployed writer called Justin Halpern began tweeting funny lines by his father Sam, under an account called ‘Shit My Dad Says’. It led to a bestselling book and then a sitcom starring the great William Shatner. And Twitter’s founders, Jack Dorsey and his colleagues at the podcasting company Odeo, certainly came up with a profitable idea: recent estimates valued the company at around £4.9 billion.

But the dark side of Twitter can hurt. Just ask Sally Bercow, who in May was found to have libelled Lord McAlpine in a tweet. She settled with him for an undisclosed amount and was ordered to pay a reported £100,000 in costs. (Perhaps it was in anticipation of such a humungous bill that Bercow began flogging furniture from her grace-and-favour apartment on eBay in the days before the verdict.) Last year, a Swiss footballer and a Greek triple-jumper were kicked off their respective Olympic teams for tweets judged to be racist. Even MPs — whose job, you might assume, is to communicate as well as possible to the public — can get themselves into hot water. When the Vatican conclave was pondering the next pontiff in March, Labour’s David Lammy, in a hopeful stab at wit, accused a tweet by the BBC of implying that the white or black smoke would be an indicator of ‘the race of the next pope’. An hour later he tweeted a sort-of apology: ‘Note to self: do not tweet from the Chamber with only one eye on what you’re reading. Sorry, folks, my mistake.’

What snared Lammy, Bercow and the rest is that Twitter seems like tossed-off speech down the pub but, in fact, has the permanence and reach of published writing. Psychotherapist Dr Aaron Balick (@DrAaronB), author of the forthcoming book The Psychodynamics of Social Networking, says: ‘In many ways, a tweet is more like a thought than a statement — however, it is indeed a statement, often an indelible one, and they can have real consequences.’ Twitter also seduces the user with near-instant feedback via replies and retweets. Balick explains: ‘On the psychological level each response is experienced as an ego stroke — a voice saying, “Well done” for making a catchy tweet: this can be psychologically addictive.’

Psychologist and cognitive scientist Tom Stafford (@tomstafford) says that the sheer speediness of Twitter is addictive, too. ‘It’s well known,’ he explains, ‘that human judgements are powerfully affected by time proximity. This is why most of us can only be motivated when the deadline is nearly upon us, and why we underpay our pensions… Like most communication technology, Twitter is designed to prioritise the immediate over the temporally distant. The very fact that the top of your

Twitter feed is things being said right now, that the updates are instantaneous, that the alerts are sent to your phone, interrupting whatever you are doing — all these show that the design is absolutely focused on appealing to our short-term attention, not our long-term interests.’

So you can fall foul of Twitter’s dark side by mainlining the high-fructose cyber-rush without a thought to your long-term reputational health. But you can also become a victim without tweeting at all. Soon after the bombings at the Boston Marathon this year, the name of a missing student from Brown University, Sunil Tripathi, became a trending topic on Twitter, as cyber-vigilantes there and on Reddit fondly imagined that they were doing real detective work. A Facebook page that Tripathi’s family had set up to help find him was defaced with vicious slurs from people who wrongly assumed he was the bomber. Tripathi’s body was later found in a river after the real Boston bombing culprits had been identified. He had died before the bombings, so Twitter played no part in his death directly, but it did bring upon the family what they described as a ‘tremendous and painful amount of attention’.

Even inoffensive messages can be pounced on by flash mobs of self-appointed Twitter police, sloppily waving their virtual nightsticks. In June, Gwyneth Paltrow tweeted excitedly from a live concert in Paris by Jay-Z and Kanye West. ‘Ni**as in Paris for real,’ she wrote (using asterisks herself), a reference to the rappers’ own song of that title. There was a certain enjoyable dissonance to the spectacle of the wholesomely toxin-free actress and cookbook compiler speaking rap. But instead of smiling indulgently, the keyboard cops pounced with: ‘Gwyneth Paltrow Tweets The N-Word.’ ‘Hold up,’ Paltrow squeaked, ‘it’s the title of the song!’ (Confusingly, anyone who gently points out that some people act like the Twitter police will then be accused themselves of trying to police Twitter — by trying to stop people policing Twitter.)

Research shows that there is a disinhibiting effect to online communication: people say things online that they wouldn’t dare say to your face. And Twitter ‘is more disinhibiting than real life and even Facebook,’ Balick argues, ‘because there is less personal context in which to situate another person.’ This is the psychological root of trolling: the showers of abuse — racist, sexist and just plain nasty — that give the internet a bad name.

Helen Lewis (@helenlewis), deputy editor of the New Statesman, has 30,000 followers on Twitter. Earlier this year, over the course of a few months, she was ‘targeted by a group of feminist tweeters who didn’t think I was their kind of feminist, trashed anything I wrote or said, and tried to claim I was a racist without ever being able to point to anything racist I had supposedly said or done’. This concerted group bullying can be very upsetting, and sometimes drives people off Twitter for good. ‘In my case,’ Lewis says, ‘I left Twitter for a couple of days, and when I had calmed down, I came back and went on a blocking spree.’

Prominent women in particular get this sort of thing all the time. Caitlin Moran was mobbed last autumn after saying, with admirable vim, that she ‘literally couldn’t give a shit’ about the racial balance of the cast of Lena Dunham’s TV show Girls; and Suzanne Moore was hounded in January after what was judged by the lynch-mob to be an insufficiently respectful reference to Brazilian transsexuals. Lewis points out: ‘Negative responses to women are targeted more at them personally, rather than at their arguments. There is a substantial minority of tweeters who, on hearing a woman say something they disagree with, will jump straight to “You’re fat”, “You’re ugly”. I know that men get abuse on Twitter, too, but I bet far fewer of them get threatened with rape or called a c***.’ (Personally, I’ve been called a dick and an idiot, but never a c***.)

As long as Twitter encourages disinhibition and short-termism, we’ll never stamp out trolling. What complicates things is that the disinhibiting effect is also what makes Twitter so brilliant. By lowering the friction of conversation, Stafford points out, Twitter ‘encourages people to talk to each other. You might tweet people you’d never write to, or write back to, basically because it is such a minimal form.’

For instance, the other week, I casually asked a question on Twitter about quantum mechanics. Within minutes, a scientist who literally fires lasers at stuff for a living had answered. That’s why Twitter is awesome. But it’s also why Twitter can be revolting; because the people who can so easily talk to you might be rape-threatening basement-dwellers, not friendly laser-wielding physicists.

A topical storm on Twitter gathers quickly and thunders on for hours or days before dissipating as rapidly as it arrived. Then it’s back to the calm blue skies of kittens falling off sofas, and spoilers about Game of Thrones. With its evanescent fetishes and furiously manufactured outrages, might Twitter represent the boiling, virtual id of society? Balick says: ‘It’s fair to say that there is a relation to what’s going on in a Twitter-storm and what can be called a representation of the social consciousness — even the social unconscious.’

Maybe, as with real weather, we’ll just have to live with it. If you mess with the dynamics that allow Twitter tornadoes to happen, you could also make it more difficult for people who use Twitter to organise democratic protest and counter official lies. So it’s not quite like Obi-Wan Kenobi versus Darth Vader after all. In the tempestuous virtual unconscious, the light side and the dark side of the Twitter force are inextricably intertwined.